Netflix Shines Bright at Annie TV Awards

Wins for "BoJack Horseman" and "Love, Death & Robots" buoyed the streamer at the awards.

When it comes to animated television, it’s good to be Netflix. That was the takeaway of Saturday evening’s 47th Annual Annie Awards, during which the streamer garnered major wins for both the big and small screens.

Awarded by the Los Angeles outlet of the International Animated Film Association, the honors aim to celebrate excellence in animated entertainment. The top prize on the TV side came in the form of the underwhelmingly named category known as Best General Audience TV/Media Production, which went to Netflix’s “BoJack Horseman” for the second consecutive year.

Though it took awhile for the organization to warm to the series, a scathing deconstruction of Hollywood centered around a depressive horse, the back-to-back wins suggest that even as “BoJack Horseman” heads into its final batch of episodes, it concludes as one of the finest shows on television.

Perhaps more impressive than the show’s win is the competition it faced within the category. Edging out Netflix’s “Big Mouth” and DC Universe’s “Harley Quinn,” the series also beat label-mates “Tuca & Bertie” (Netflix) and “Undone” (Amazon Prime), both of which, like “BoJack Horseman,” are produced by The Tornante Company.

Other wins for Netflix came in Best Writing for the since-cancelled “Tuca & Bertie” (Shauna McGarry), Storyboarding and Character Design for “Carmen Sandiego,” and Animated Preschool TV/Media for “Ask the Storybots.”

For those fans anxious to read the tea leaves of the Annie Awards in an attempt to make sense of the 2020 Emmy Awards, it’s best not to get too excited. When it comes to direct correlations, the general winner at the Annies rarely translates to an Emmy win, for better or worse. In fact, it wasn’t until 2019 that the Television Academy nominated any Netflix show in the animated series category, at which point streaming giant broke in with both “BoJack Horseman” and “Big Mouth.”

Still, for as long as it took the Annies to get on-board with Netflix animation, 2020 could be the year the Emmy Awards finally look deep inside themselves and decide to embrace a morose horse.